SpongeBob SquarePants: The Best Day Ever (CD)
(Nick/SonyBMG)
SpongeBob SquarePants: Season 4, Volume 1 (DVD)
(Nick/Paramount)
When Brian Wilson created Pet Sounds, the album widely heralded as the Beach Boys’ crowning achievement and one of the great albums of rock, he and his cowriters really got inside the mind of the lonely adolescent in a way that few pop craftsmen have before or since. And now, four decades later, we can finally put a face to Wilson’s portrait of the innocent adrift in a strange world of grown-ups and cynics. It is the yellow face of SpongeBob SquarePants, rising high on a symphonic seawall of sound as he sings an ode to… ”My Tighty Wightys.”
The new SpongeBob CD, The Best Day Ever, is not quite a teenage symphony to God, as Wilson once described Smile, but it’s as close as a mainstream kids’ record is going to come. The ridiculously lush ”My Tighty Wightys” is the most obvious nod to the Pet Sounds sound, all the way down to such little touches as including the bass harmonica player from the Beach Boys’ original sessions. Meanwhile, Wilson himself shows up doing all the background vocals on a track that pays tribute to the Boys’ surf era, ”Doin’ the Krabby Patty.” The disc is pickin’ up good crustaceans thanks to the collaboration of Tom Kenny, a rock hound who provides the voice of SpongeBob [see our chat with him here], and producer Andy Paley, whose work with rock legends includes an unreleased but widely bootlegged Wilson solo album.
Together, they’ve created a collection that’s ostensibly for kids but may mean the most to the kind of rock cultists who slavishly read liner notes and pore over Goldmine magazine every month. The disc is formatted as a DJ-narrated hour on an old-school Top 40 station, but the music is not just all Beach Boys homages, all the time. Two of the best songs are garage-rock anthems that might have been taken right off a waterlogged copy of the Nuggets boxed set: Patrick belts out — well, blurts out — ”Under My Rock,” a paean to home, while Plankton gets a classic bad-guy number in the aptly titled ”You Will Obey!” where he sounds like a little like Eric Burdon, from the Animals, turned fascist. You can play Name That Influence throughout: Hey, there’s the keyboard line from ”I’m a Believer”! Hey, there’s the Farfisa from ”96 Tears”! Hey, there’s an homage to the Ramones paying homage to the Beach Boys! It doesn’t hurt that the session players include the likes of Tommy Ramone, NRBQ (their first full-band reunion in years), Nino Tempo, ex-Byrd Herb Pederson, and Elvis sideman James Burton.
It also just happens to be the ideal album for elementary schoolers, since each one of the beloved characters gets at least one terrific showcase number that transcends any in-jokiness in the musical bed. But if your 6-year-old wonders why you’re waxing on about Pet Sounds and you don’t even mean Gary the snail, or why an ode to briefs sung by an animate sponge is making you wistful for your own youth, smile politely and say, as Brian Wilson would, ”I guess I just wasn’t made for these times.”
The release date of ”The Best Day Ever” on CD coincides with the arrival on DVD of the series’ ”Season 4, Volume 1.” If you’re a little bit confused by the multiple numerals in that title, you’re not alone, While previous seasons of ”SpongeBob” have been released in one package each, Nick viewers are still in a gap between ”halves” of season 4 — with the season’s second half set to begin airing in late September — and the home video folks must’ve decided it was better to get a half-season in stores before Christmas 2006 than none at all. Few of the show’s most faithful fans would argue that it’s been reaching a creative zenith this year, but the 18 episodes on view in this two-disc set still make a good case that the series isn’t nearly ready to be sent off to Davy Jones’ locker… not when there are plot devices yet to be explored like Mr. Krabs molting (”Shell of a Man”) and Patrick undergoing a ”Charly”-like transformation into a raging intellectual (”Patrick Smartpants”).
The Best Day Ever: A-;
SpongeBob SquarePants: Season 4, Volume 1: B+
Recommended ages: 4 to… 94! LoL!
(Via Entertainment Weekly)
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